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Most developers stagnate both intellectually and productively after 4-5 years in industry; they adopt some tools, pick up some patterns, learn a language or two, and maybe they’re even able to work at a successful company and contribute to some important products. Great! But what happens when you hand a developer a blank sheet of paper and the opportunity for them to own a product? Most of the time: chaos and failure.

If you want to be a better developer, it starts with changing the way you look at your code and how you program.

He makes good points but perhaps misses the deaper reason for the 'lack of confidence' he often sites as being behind failures. All too often this is due to developers who can use the tools but don't really have a deep understanding of how they work. They panic when given a blank sheet of paper because they've never been asked or asked themselves the question. "What if I really had to start from scratch?" and then gone away and worked out the answers. This is not about taking the customer point of view or understanding that it's business problems that we're solving it's quite the reverse it's about caring about code for the sake of code. First wanting to do it right and to have full insight into what's happening from the registers upwards so that you can make sure it's done right, own it completely and understand it completely. If developers never get to do this why is it a surprise that they lack confidence and rely on habituated ways of doing things. Most have spent their entire carrers being told not to look under the hood, just fix the surface problem and get it shipped, because people who don't understand software will never grasp that that is not where the long term interest of the business lies.

"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage." Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)